Retrochallenge Summer 2014

I have a recurring dream where it’s finals week, and I show up for my last test only to realize that I’ve forgotten to go to class for the entire semester. That’s kind of how I feel right now – a new Retrochallenge is coming around in a couple days, and I haven’t really accomplished much since the end of the last one. (Nothing I can post about, anyway – if I were writing about work-related stuff, man would I have some stories.)

I’ve been casting around for a Commodore 64 project, and I think I’ve got something good. Earlier this year I picked up a boxed copy of Questron, an old computer RPG originally published by SSI. I thought about just playing it again for the challenge, and then I thought about maybe, um, cheating a little bit, and then I got the idea: I’m going to try to write a character editor for Questron.

Questron I, published in 1984. Incidentally, much harder to find than its sequel.

Now of course this means I’ll have to reverse engineer the format of the save-game files, and then write something to modify them. While I’m at it, I’d like to see if I can document some other aspects of the game, too, like how the map and tile data is stored. Since I’ve got an original game disk now, I might also try to figure out how the copy protection works (especially since most of the cracked versions of the game available on line are only semi-functional).

The caveat here is that I really don’t have any experience with that kind of reverse engineering, so I don’t know how hard that’s going to be. I might fail spectacularly. But I’d like to think I’ll be able to figure out something.